She Can
Breaking the glass ceiling: For one and all?
Francesca Manzi & Madeline Heilman
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research challenges the assumption that the presence of women in leadership positions will automatically "break the glass ceiling" for other women. We contend that it is not just a female leader's presence, but also her performance, that influences evaluations of subsequent female candidates for leadership positions. We argue that the continued scarcity and perceived mismatch of women with high-level leadership increases gender salience, promoting perceptions of within-group similarity and fostering an evaluative generalization from the performance of a female leader to the evaluations of another, individual woman. In 5 studies, we demonstrate that the effect of exposure to a female leader on another woman's evaluations and leadership opportunities depends on whether she is successful or unsuccessful (Study 1) and whether she confirms or disconfirms stereotype-based expectations about women's leadership abilities (Study 2). Supporting the role of gender salience and shared group membership in the process, we show that this effect occurs only between women in male gender-typed leadership roles: Evaluative generalization does not occur between women in contexts that are not strongly male in gender type (Study 3) and is not observed between men in male-typed leadership (Study 4). We also explore whether there is evaluative generalization between male leaders in a female-typed context (Study 5). Our results suggest that overcoming gender imbalances in leadership may not be as simple as targeted placement, and that having women in high places should not induce complacency about the elimination of gender bias.
Gender stereotypes can explain the gender-equality paradox
Thomas Breda et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8 December 2020, Pages 31063-31069
Abstract:
The so-called "gender-equality paradox" is the fact that gender segregation across occupations is more pronounced in more egalitarian and more developed countries. Some scholars have explained this paradox by the existence of deeply rooted or intrinsic gender differences in preferences that materialize more easily in countries where economic constraints are more limited. In line with a strand of research in sociology, we show instead that it can be explained by cross-country differences in essentialist gender norms regarding math aptitudes and appropriate occupational choices. To this aim, we propose a measure of the prevalence and extent of internalization of the stereotype that "math is not for girls" at the country level. This is done using individual-level data on the math attitudes of 300,000 15-y-old female and male students in 64 countries. The stereotype associating math to men is stronger in more egalitarian and developed countries. It is also strongly associated with various measures of female underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and can therefore entirely explain the gender-equality paradox. We suggest that economic development and gender equality in rights go hand-in-hand with a reshaping rather than a suppression of gender norms, with the emergence of new and more horizontal forms of social differentiation across genders.
The Career Evolution of the Sex Gap in Wages: Discrimination vs. Human Capital Investment
David Neumark & Giannina Vaccaro
NBER Working Paper, December 2020
Abstract:
Several studies find that there is little sex gap in wages at labor market entry, and that the sex gap in wages emerges (and grows) with time in the labor market. This evidence is consistent with (i) there is little or no sex discrimination in wages at labor market entry, and (ii) the emergence of the sex gap in wages with time in the labor market reflects differences between men and women in human capital investment (and other decisions), with women investing less early in their careers. Indeed, some economists explicitly interpret the evidence this way. We show that this interpretation ignores two fundamental implications of the human capital model, and that differences in investment can complicate the interpretation of both the starting sex gap in wages (or absence of a gap), and the differences in "returns" to experience. We then estimate stylized structural models of human capital investment and wage growth to identify the effects of discrimination and differences in human capital investment, and find evidence more consistent with discrimination reducing women's wages at labor market entry.
Gender achievement gaps: The role of social costs to trying hard in high school
Joseph Workman & Anke Heyder
Social Psychology of Education, December 2020, Pages 1407-1427
Abstract:
In American high schools female students put greater effort into school and outperform boys on indicators of academic success. Using data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, we found female students' greater academic effort and achievement was partly explained by different social incentives to trying hard in school experienced by male and female students. Males were 1.75 times as likely to report they would be unpopular for trying hard in school and 1.50 times as likely to report they would be made fun of for trying hard in school. Social costs to trying hard in school were directly associated with less rigorous mathematics course-taking and indirectly associated with lower GPA in STEM courses through lower academic effort.
Gender (Still) Matters in Business School
Aradhna Krishna & Yeşim Orhun
Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research documents systematic gender performance differences (GPD) at a top business school using a unique administrative dataset and survey of students. The findings show that women's grades are 11% of a standard deviation lower in quantitative courses than those of men with similar academic aptitude and demographics, and men's grades are 23% of a standard deviation lower in nonquantitative courses than those of comparable women. The authors discuss and test for different reasons for this finding. They show that a female instructor significantly cuts down GPD for quantitative courses by raising the grades of women. In addition, female instructors increase women's interest and performance expectations in these courses and are perceived as role models by their female students. These results provide support for a gender stereotype process for GPD and show that faculty can serve as powerful exemplars to challenge gender stereotypes and increase student achievement. The authors discuss several important implications of these findings for business schools and for society.
The confidence gap predicts the gender pay gap among STEM graduates
Adina Sterling et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 December 2020, Pages 30303-30308
Abstract:
Women make less than men in some science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. While explanations for this gender pay gap vary, they have tended to focus on differences that arise for women and men after they have worked for a period of time. In this study we argue that the gender pay gap begins when women and men with earned degrees enter the workforce. Further, we contend the gender pay gap may arise due to cultural beliefs about the appropriateness of women and men for STEM professions that shape individuals' self-beliefs in the form of self-efficacy. Using a three-wave NSF-funded longitudinal survey of 559 engineering and computer science students that graduated from over two dozen institutions in the United States between 2015 and 2017, we find women earn less than men, net of human capital factors like engineering degree and grade point average, and that the influence of gender on starting salaries is associated with self-efficacy. We find no support for a competing hypothesis that the importance placed on pay explains the pay gap; there is no gender difference in reported importance placed on pay. We also find no support for the idea that women earn less because they place more importance on workplace culture; women do value workplace culture more, but those who hold such values earn more rather than less. Overall, the results suggest that addressing cultural beliefs as manifested in self-beliefs - that is, the confidence gap - commands attention to reduce the gender pay gap.
The central role of the ask gap in gender pay inequality
Nina Roussille
University of California Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This paper studies the role of the ask gap in generating wage inequality, using novel data from Hired.com, an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs in the United States. To use the platform, job candidates must post an ask salary, stating how much they want to make in their next job. Firms then apply to candidates by offering them a bid salary, solely based on the candidate's resume and ask salary. If the candidate is hired, a final salary is recorded. After adjusting for resume characteristics, the ask gap is 3.3%, the gap in bid salaries is 2.4%, and the gap in final offers is 1.8%. Remarkably, further controlling for the ask salary explains the entirety of the residual gender gaps in bid and final salaries. To estimate the market-level effects of an increase in women's ask salaries, I exploit an unanticipated change in how candidates were prompted to provide their ask. For some candidates in mid-2018, the answer box used to solicit the ask salary was changed from an empty field to an entry pre-filled with the median bid salary for similar candidates. Using an interrupted time series design, I find that this change drove the ask gap and the bid gap to zero. In addition, women did not receive fewer bids than men did due to the change, suggesting they faced little penalty for demanding wages comparable to men.
The Gender Gap Among Top Business Executives
Wolfgang Keller, Teresa Molina & William Olney
NBER Working Paper, December 2020
Abstract:
This paper examines gender differences among top business executives using a large executive-employer matched data set spanning the last quarter century. Female executives make up 6.2% of the sample and we find they exhibit more labor market churning - both higher entry and higher exit rates. Unconditionally, women earn 26% less than men, which decreases to 7.9% once executive characteristics, firm characteristics, and in particular job title are accounted for. The paper explores the extent to which firm-level temporal flexibility and corporate culture can explain these gender differences. Although we find that women tend to select into firms with temporal flexibility and a female-friendly corporate culture, there is no evidence that this sorting drives the gender pay gap. However, we do find evidence that corporate culture affects pay gaps within firms: the within-firm gender pay gap disappears entirely at female-friendly firms. Overall, while both corporate culture and flexibility affect the female share of employment, only corporate culture influences the gender pay gap.
Turing's children: Representation of sexual minorities in STEM
Dario Sansone & Christopher Carpenter
PLoS ONE, November 2020
Abstract:
We provide nationally representative estimates of sexual minority representation in STEM fields by studying 142,641 men and women in same-sex couples from the 2009-2018 American Community Surveys. These data indicate that men in same-sex couples are 12 percentage points less likely to have completed a bachelor's degree in a STEM field compared to men in different-sex couples. On the other hand, there is no gap observed for women in same-sex couples compared to women in different-sex couples. The STEM degree gap between men in same-sex and different-sex couples is larger than the STEM degree gap between all white and black men but is smaller than the gender gap in STEM degrees. We also document a smaller but statistically significant gap in STEM occupations between men in same-sex and different-sex couples, and we replicate this finding by comparing heterosexual and gay men using independently drawn data from the 2013-2018 National Health Interview Surveys. These differences persist after controlling for demographic characteristics, location, and fertility. Finally, we document that gay male representation in STEM fields (measured using either degrees or occupations) is systematically and positively associated with female representation in those same STEM fields.
Counterfeit diversity: How strategically misrepresenting gender diversity dampens organizations' perceived sincerity and elevates women's identity threat concerns
Kathryn Kroeper, Heidi Williams & Mary Murphy
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women remain underrepresented in technology and computing fields. Aware of this problem, many tech organizations seek diversification strategies. Several academic sources recommend including gender diverse images in recruitment materials as a low-cost way to potentially attract female workers. However, for gender nondiverse organizations, this strategy means misrepresenting the current on-the-ground diversity of their organization. Four experiments investigate how women and men perceive organizations that counterfeit diversity (i.e., exaggerate gender diversity in recruitment advertisements) relative to organizations that (a) authentically portray a high degree of gender diversity (authentic diversity; Experiments 1-3); (b) authentically portray a low degree of gender diversity (authentic nondiversity; Experiments 2 and 3); and (c) acknowledge a lack of diversity in the present, but aspire to increase diversity in the future (aspirational diversity; Experiment 3). Results reveal that women and men perceive counterfeit diversity as insincere. This perceived insincerity, in turn, decreases women's and men's interest in the organization and engenders identity threat concerns among women (Experiments 1-4). Taken together, these findings complicate scholarly discussions of diversity and inclusion strategies by highlighting the role of perceived sincerity. When recruitment strategies are deemed insincere, these strategies can backfire - decreasing interest in the organization, fomenting threat, and perpetuating underrepresentation.
Inside the Black Box of Organizational Life: The Gendered Language of Performance Assessment
Shelley Correll et al.
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizations implement formalized procedures to eliminate the biasing effects of gender and other characteristics on evaluations. Prior work shows managers play a key role, but researchers have been unable to observe the thought processes guiding managers' evaluations. This article takes a first step in examining managers' sensemaking as they interpret and evaluate employee behaviors. Our data include managers' written performance reviews and numeric ratings of employees at a Fortune 500 technology company. Our theoretical model - the Viewing and Valuing Social Cognitive Processing Model - explains how and when gender beliefs frame managers' evaluations, affecting what behaviors managers notice (i.e., view) and rate highly (i.e., value). After conducting a detailed coding of the language in reviews, we assess whether there are gender differences in (1) the language used to describe performance (i.e., viewing differences) and (2) the correlations between that language and numeric ratings (i.e., valuing differences). Our analysis of 88 language attributes reveals where gender frames managers' evaluations and where the process instead operates gender-neutrally. For example, men and women are equally likely to be described as having technical ability, while women are viewed as too aggressive and men as too soft. Furthermore, some behaviors, such as "taking charge," are more valued for men than for women: "taking charge" is associated with the highest performance ratings for men but not for women. Overall, our analysis identifies novel ways that gender biases emerge in a process intended to be meritocratic.
Gendered Beliefs and the Job Application Decision: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field and Lab Experiment
Kristine Koutout
Vanderbilt University Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
This paper investigates how workers' job application decisions are affected by their beliefs about hiring managers' beliefs regarding the relative productivity of women and men. To this end, I combine a natural field experiment with a lab experiment. In the field experiment, I partner with a firm to solicit approximately 5,000 job applications using ads that randomize over the gender of the hiring manager and the gender associations of the product sector. I then recruit the same job-seekers to a structured online lab experiment to elicit their beliefs about hiring managers' beliefs, based on the manager's gender and product sector. Truth-telling is incentivized with the Binarized Scoring Rule, using a procedure I adapt from Dustan, Koutout, & Leo (2020). I find that men are more likely to apply for a job with a manager whom they believe has beliefs that favor men more. A one standard deviation increase in beliefs about the manager's beliefs increases the probability a man applies by 70%. On the other hand, women are unresponsive to their beliefs about managers' beliefs. These results have important implications for the sorting by gender behavior driving a large part of the gender wage gap.
Careers Versus Children: How Childcare Affects the Academic Tenure-Track Gender Gap
Stephanie Cheng
Harvard Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
Although women compose the majority of biological science Ph.D. recipients, those who have children are 7 percentage points less likely than their male peers to ever obtain a tenure-track position - leading to a mere 30 percent female among tenure-track faculty. Using the largest nationally representative survey of U.S. Ph.D. recipients, this paper examines how a biological science Ph.D.'s first child's birth affects employment status and job characteristics by gender. I find no gender gap in tenure-track rates among individuals who never have children and among individuals before they have children. 9 percent of mothers temporarily leave the labor force after their first child is born; those who remain reduce working hours by 12 percent, compared to fathers who reduce by 6 percent. Mothers return to the labor force when their children reach school-age but shift away from tenure-track positions, leading to a 10 percentage point gender gap among tenure-track faculty with six-year-old children. However, mothers do not leave research occupations with fewer work hours, such as industry and non-tenure track positions. I conclude that short-term work reductions to focus on childcare combined with a competitive profession requiring long hours leads to long-term reductions in promotions, increasing the gender gap at the top levels of academia.
"Why So Few?": Differential Effects of Framing the Gender Gap in STEM Recruitment Interventions
Colleen Cowgill et al.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Interventions designed to increase women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines sometimes emphasize the STEM gender gap. Drawing upon optimal distinctiveness theory, we hypothesized that interventions overtly emphasizing women's minority status in STEM might lead to less interest in STEM relative to interventions with subtler references to women's minority status. In Study 1, women who viewed a STEM recruitment presentation drawing direct attention to the STEM gender gap showed lower implicit identification with STEM compared to those who viewed a presentation referencing gender through images alone. In Study 2, women's greater feelings of unwanted distinctiveness in STEM following a presentation emphasizing the enduring gender gap (relative to one emphasizing the closing gender gap) had a significant indirect effect on their interest in STEM. In Study 3, women who viewed information about the gender distribution of a STEM company expressed less interest in the job when the same information was framed in terms of a continuing gender gap (vs. women's growing representation), due to reduced feelings of belonging and increased feelings of unwanted distinctiveness. The present findings indicate that those designing STEM interventions targeting women should do so in ways that not only make women feel welcomed into the discipline but also do not place undue emphasis on women's underrepresentation.
Hiring and Intra-occupational Gender Segregation in Software Engineering
Santiago Campero
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women tend to be segregated into different subspecialties than men within male-dominated occupations, but the mechanisms contributing to such intra-occupational gender segregation remain obscure. In this study, I use data from an online recruiting platform and a survey to examine the hiring mechanisms leading to gender segregation within software engineering and development. I find that women are much more prevalent among workers hired in software quality assurance than in other software subspecialties. Importantly, jobs in software quality assurance are lower-paying and perceived as lower status than jobs in other software subspecialties. In examining the origins of this pattern, I find that it stems largely from women being more likely than men to apply for jobs in software quality assurance. Further, such gender differences in job applications are attenuated among candidates with stronger educational credentials, consistent with the idea that relevant accomplishments help mitigate gender differences in self-assessments of competence and belonging in these fields. Demand-side selection processes further contribute to gender segregation, as employers penalize candidates with quality assurance backgrounds, a subspecialty where women are overrepresented, when they apply for jobs in other, higher-status software subspecialties.
Left but Not Forgotten: Gender Differences in Networks and Performance Following Mobility
Evelyn Zhang, Brandy Aven & Adam Kleinbaum
University of Toronto Working Paper, September 202
Abstract:
This paper investigates how shifts in an individual's communication network when the individual experiences a job change affect performance and how those effects differ between men and women. Using a rich proprietary dataset including the personnel records, monthly performance, and email communications of thousands of employees, we examine job changes occurring within a large financial institution. Comparing objective performance prior to and following each job change, we show that mobility is disruptive to individual performance, but that women's performance is less hampered than that of men. We argue and find evidence that this variation in performance can be explained by women's and men's differential likelihood of retaining ties to former colleagues at their previous jobs. While women tend to be embedded in dense networks that may limit their advancement in times of stability, these same network patterns may also foster the retention of relationships to colleagues when women employees move to new jobs. Such "network resilience" offers multiple benefits that bolster their post-move performance. Our results contribute to research on mobility, social network dynamics, and gender by showing that network characteristics that are conventionally considered disadvantageous in the cross-section may help mitigate performance challenges when individuals experience job mobility.